Unironic answer: most airports. Even small ones will have avionics shops, those avionics shops will have to test Emergency Locator Beacons, and those beacon signals are not meant to escape to the outside world during testing.

Thus, most have Faraday rooms, cages, or just small (2-3 cubic feet) boxes to block signals. I used to work for one of those teeny-tiny companies. Would not recommend working in aviation. That said, knocking on the door and offering to come back with doughnuts if they can help you out when it's not crazy busy, feels like less an insane idea than I'd have expected previously.

You might have to line the inner walls with something to prevent the signal from bouncing back? I'm not sure.

Inside a microwave oven.

Having worked for several billion-dollar companies, I can tell you it's very common. The extremely short answer to why is "silos on silos on silos on silos". Quite often, each team rolls things out however the hell they feel like. And the teams don't have very good people on them. It doesn't have to be this way, but the people at these companies simply don't give a shit about doing it in a better way. Bad leadership ensures it continues.

I 100% guarantee everyone who uses one of these was railroaded into mandatory arbitration.

They knew they should have announced a recall, but they didn't. What they did was... They simply replace the TV panel, even outside the warranty, just to avoid lawsuits (After the person first try to contact them).

Yes, outside the warranty.

But one with one detail: They replace it with the same defective panel.

Unfortunately, I was the lucky one who ended up buying this TV, and I've already replaced the panel about three times in less than five years.

Even the Samsung repair technicians that came to my house to fix the TV already told "The model just have this issue, nothing we can do about it. If it happens again, report it again to fix"

previous used https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/12/13/samsungs-chief-st...

new one uses, but just does not tell it.

apply display is good with apple tv.

and ceo dislikes automatically installed free to play tv apps and ads. as samsung does.

'Having' (paid for) a device for not having it for weeks is not that customer friendly attitude. It is almost in the same league with how UK furniture makers exploit customers. You get into the shop, see something nice, start ordering it, casually ask about the delivery date, cancelling the whole thing and run to an Ikea after learning that it will take somewhere between 4-6 months, depending on the workload of the factory. They are insane! I mean those who actually buy this way. The manufacturers are just brazen. Thinking that someone goes into the shop for leaving behind money for the honor of using a product of theirs sometime in the unspecific mid term future, instead of like NOW!? Shameless.

Why on earth would anybody do that? I have these speakers, exactly model D, it works flawlessly either via eArc with TV or Bluetooth with both android and apple, there is absolutely nothing to fix or improve. You have to tinker with USB key and obscure series of actions or install a dedicated app on phone to force an update - why would anybody ever need such an app in first place? I am minimizing amount of apps on my phone, and not installing every semi-unknown low quality crap just because I can. That's basic security 101.

You can tweak basses directly on remote for these. These speakers are not HiFi albeit cca fine performers, realistically you will never need more from them (and TBH that one feature is absolutely stellar idea that many much more expensive receivers don't have, when kids go sleep I lower basses since they travel easier through walls and doors).

Its like pushing unknown BIOS updates to motherboard when your PC works perfectly fine, and then complaining it isn't anymore. Its sad state of 2025 electronics in general, but it was exactly same 10 or even 15 years ago, this ain't something new or unknown.

And I assume my WiFi router updates have helped prevent people doing evil things with my devices.

Samsung's update here is obviously a massive fail, but it's one consumer device out of tens of thousands. I think it's clear the benefits outweigh the harms on the whole. Definitely sucks if you bought this particular soundbar though.

It's not even like people don't have the option, they're just suckers for marketing and don't fully research anything. Free markets are useless if the consumers are this dumb.

(Or not, of course...)

NEVER BUYING A SAMSUNG TV AGAIN

I have a modern Sony Bravia, too, which is running "Google TV" natively. On the plus side, the UI is just about identical to what you get with a Google TV dongle (which I also have, plugged into an old 32" monitor in front of my bike trainer), but it's also a really heavy interface that's also increasingly rich in ads. If your household is like mine, and holds subscriptions to a half dozen or more streaming services, some of which are bundled and some of which are either discounted or comped via entirely different subscriptions (mobile phone) or membership (credit card), it's really not helpful to have Google show me subscriptions I might want to add-on to my Google TV sub, nor do I appreciate seeing ads for content from things I don't subscribe to. Also, the Sony remote has about 50 buttons -- not a fan.

All things considered, I end up having to fiddle with the Sony TV far more frequently than the Samsung one, usually because of network or app issues.

We have an old Roku stick plugged into an old tv in a spare room, too, and it's almost intolerably slow. It's primary use case is to plug into our projector for backyard movies in nice weather, so I keep it around, but man is it dog slow.

TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice to fit to a cheap tablet.

They sit within a custom app framework which was written before HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on TV?

Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance requires some effort. And the backend developers want to shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app.

After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are competing with cheap white label brands where the customer doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on, argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than 5c on each box made.

For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever increasing, aging range of products.

And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing the message and delivering.

I have a "smart" Samsung TV in my home office but it's never been plugged into the network and has a chromecast and various networked devices plugged in to it as a "dumb tv", that has been working out great, the TV still turns on/off easily and is as fast as the day I bought it (makes sense, it's still running the factory firmware).

Every time you’d start the tv it’d switch to the Samsung Baywatch 24/7 stream.

So inappropriate for the children.

I'm never buying any Samsung products again if I can avoid it. A forced update bricked my damn phone when it forcibly restarted while I was showing something to a client.

Samsung doesn't give a shit. They'll trash the device you paid for and tell you to suck it up and buy a new one.

I want a separation between my display device and the thing serving it anyhow, but that's just me in my techie world. The fact that performance got worse with each update, though, that's just over the line for everyone. I mean, if you're going to babble about how you're upgrading my experience, shouldn't you, you know, upgrade my experience instead of constantly downgrading it? My experience gets downgraded, but gee golly, it sure seems like yours is getting upgraded.

Well. It's really not that hard to not plug in the ethernet cable.

My Roku boxes have also had the same trajectory over the years. As time rolls on, they just get slower and slower with each update. Slowly, but surely. How exactly this is accomplished I'm not even sure, it's not like they're overflowing with new features or doing bold new computations for my benefit. They just get a little bit slower every effing time. But at least replacing my Roku boxes is $20-40 now. Hey, sure, OK, a $40 thing probably can't be expected to work 5 years from now. If nothing else, video codecs do march on and specs may exceed what the hardware decoders can handle. OK. My $1000+ TV does not get that grace. It damned well better be able to turn on in less than 30 seconds, even 10 years, 20 years from now. No excuses.

Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...

LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case as of a couple of years ago—I disconnected my LG from the internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back.

Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying through the nose for it.

(disclaimer: maybe 5-10 years ago)

This doesn't work if your threat model includes denying rollbacks to prevent exploiting bugs in old firmware. I'd love to be able to roll-back firmware on some of my devices to allow me to "jailbreak" them using old firmware.

In some cases your newer firmware may be blowing e-fuses that prevent old firmware from functioning. See the Nintendo Switch, for an example.

To be clear: I think this is anti-consumer and wrong, but manufacturers absolutely do it.

Edit: I also think it should be illegal, by way of consumer regulation. I don't think consumers should have option to waive their right to manufacturers not damaging hardware they own.

There are commercial offerings (like mender.io, never used) that basically specialize in providing rock solid update infrastructure, but that again takes investment and organizational priority that doesn't exist for non-feature code.

Offline first approach respects user autonomy and creates a natural safety net against bad updates. Plus, it means your product keeps working even when servers change or get shut down years later or a nuclear war happens. Sure, connectivity has benefits, but a speaker's main job is playing sound, not phoning home. Building offline-first also forces better engineering decisions about longevity and graceful degradation.

It's so hard to find any offline-first apps/devices nowawdays, which is sad to see in a world of algorithms and AI.

This whole situation reminds me of this: https://programmerhumor.io/linux-memes/thats-the-attitude-sa...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534793

See their new app debacle which coupled a non-reversible firmware update that made the hardware incompatible with the old app.

3. have a set of conditions to mark the running firmware image as "safe" and have it become the new fallback firmware image for this scenario. That way you can have a recently up-to-date firmware version constantly trailing the new ones

I'm not sure I understand various industries' conventions...

While interviewing for a principal engineer job, I was meeting individually with a bunch of team leads and managers, and one engineer asked how would I design firmware updating for the company's product (which was more critical, complex, and expensive than a soundbar).

I assumed they were probably trying to see whether I would throw in some robustness/resilience (not oversimplify it). So I sketched it out, while hitting notes like diffs, downloading and assembling in staging space, imperfect networking, having at least two firmware "slots", backing out upon boot loop or failure soon after boot, gradual deployment to installed base, contrasting with some less-critical consumer product firmware update practices, etc.

(Either that was a bad answer, or they got distracted thinking about something I'd said, because I was getting odd subconscious backchannel cues, and they were unresponsive when I tried elicit more requirements or guidance about what they were looking for. Maybe there was some standard embedded systems programmer canned answer that I was supposed to recite (analogous to the Web brogrammer 'system design' interview), and they couldn't think of how to nudge me towards the shibboleth without saying it?)

I think it usually takes a big rollout for these big companies to actually "hear" their users.

I'm reminded of the time a random NPR station accidentally bricked the infotainment systems on thousands of Mazdas and because there was no factory reset feature they had to spend millions replacing head units. That's just bad design.

Why on earth a sound bar needs to update its firmware? Why firmware needs to be in a couple of tweeters and a woofer? It should basically output audio from an input source.

After many years of being burned I always delay system level non-security -related updates at least several days after launch to mitigate the risk.

Do you mean like a physical button? That could work, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it. Holding down power for 10 seconds (or whatever) usually just erases user data, but doesn't reset firmware. Are you aware of any device that does this? But does it require some meta-firmware to roll back the firmware? What if that meta-firmware has a security flaw and needs to be updated? And that update is faulty?

If you're talking about a code sent from your servers to devices to reset, that seems like asking for the impossible. If a firmware update bricks the device, that may very well brick its ability to receive codes at all.

In both situations, it starts to feel like a problem of infinite regress...

That's a nifty mechanism that also allows downgrade attacks, so it has cybersecurity implications that may or may not be acceptable. Furthermore, it might not be practical or even be possible to restore the system to factory condition due to technical reasons.

The team next door allows its systems to downgrade to a previous minor version with a mandatory factory reset. It however refuses downgrading to a previous major version because it implies the bootloader was upgraded or the storage was repartitioned and they really don't want to rollback that.

New firmware is pushed in phases 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50% then full scale.

Each stage has some delay incorporated for acquisition/application and then for telemetry (including support contacts from affected accounts) to determine impact and allow for regression fixes.

The other reason they would phase launches is because of firmware builds being used across multiple CPE models and hardware revisions, where only a small subset of hardware could wind up being problematic, but not discovered until deployment.

When you have millions of devices deployed, even a fraction of devices having an issue can create a shit storm on the support side of things.

It all seems so obvious once you know to think about it.

A failsafe firmware reset back to a safe and secure state yes. The factory state is not necessarily that, so no.

I think devices should keep a last known good state firmware but keeping a full factory state immutable firmware would be irresponsible for many usecases.

Especially if there is an internal testing stage before actually rolling out to production. It's possible that the users seeing the bricked devices are in fact limited to the initial wave, but the damage is already done.

Or perhaps to the very first released firmware version. This way they don't have to support updating from any version to the latest, just from the first one.

#1: Requires competence, and/or management that isn't too focused on velocity and features to listen to their engineers' warnings about exactly the sort of problem being discussed here.

#2: Many firmware updates explicitly and specifically want to strip away features that the hardware shipped with (by introducing DRM, paywalls, etc.), so see the comment about management above.

It reminds me of some discussion I was seeing the other day about how the dynamic island on the newer iPhones is way buggier than it was at launch. Someone suggested that this happens because the S-tier engineers are tasked with building these things to blow everyone out of the water at launch, and then B-tier developers are tasked with maintaining them for the following years, at which point stuff starts regressing.

Weirdly, serious groups, among them Signal seem to be clueless about this rule. In Signal, in their security concious context, this is a bit of puzzle to me why. They have updates every few days sometime, but no more than 2 weeks pass by without their update banner appears in the most prominent spot in their desktop app: above all of your recent chats, with background higlight to pop out even more, if someone would miss in important messaging. Like if this was the most important thing for everyone around - so much that it is made not possible to turn off -, to keep their software very very fresh, the freshest possible! It is generously allowed not to download updates immediatly, but that's it. The alert is always there.

But there are so little changes between updates. Once I checked the history, dominantly marginal things. Yet, the prime spot in their UI is occupied with these marginal things too, all the time (it must not be critical update in every few days because that frequency of security risks would be too worrysome for an app like Signal!).

And this is just one of the examples out there, there are too many similar ones (serious or marginal use apps alike).

Looks like software engineers lost sense throughout time, thinking the central spot of the user's mind is occupied like their own with the maintenance and state of their precious product. Not the task at hand where some whatever tool should help, without grabbing the attention away from the task all the time (also with all those frequent 'helpful' pop-up tips many software employ - I am looking at you Teams as prime perpetrator - for self advertisement, that is an other senseless narcissistic attitude).